You can have your sunny Christmas entertainments. As
the holiday comes just as the cold, dark winter season descends, it seems to me
that the literature of the season has to somehow acknowledge the darkness
inside and outside ourselves.
It took her husband’s mental illness and her
consequent need to provide for her family that led P.D. James (1920-2014) to work for Britain’s National Health
Service and the Police Department, where she developed the medical and criminal
expertise that underlay her detective novels. Well into middle age when her
first novel was published, she continued until her death a half century later.
I don’t know why I haven’t read more of James’ work,
since I have enjoyed what I have gotten around to—notably, The Black Tower and An
Unsuitable Job for a Woman. Maybe it’s because she wrote so many Adam
Dalgliesh novels, and the prospect of reading another, after seeing Roy Marsden
on TV in the role of the solitary, depressed poetry-loving detective, was more
than I could take.
But when I saw James’
posthumous collection, Sleep No More: Six Murderous Tales
offered on sale as a used hardcover at Barnes & Noble recently, I snapped it up quickly. Reading
it has made me anxious to try to get hold of a similarly themed holiday
collection of hers, The
Mistletoe Murder and Other Stories.
One friend has told me she prefers up in an entirely different world. In contrast, I find that short
fiction—from the simple tale to the more complex novella—suits my schedule
better. And, truth be told, it is easier for an author to achieve perfection on
a small than a sprawling scale.
Unlike Agatha Christie, James creates suspense not
so much through carefully planted clues and artful indirection, but through
setting and psychology. These virtues transferred from the Dalgleish and
Charlotte Grey detective novels that made her reputation to more general crime
fiction—like the novel Innocent Blood
and the tales (which appeared originally in various anthologies from 1976 to
2006) in this slender volume.
Two of the six tales in Sleep No More are set in
the holiday season. With extraordinary vividness in these two tales, James
evokes a time and place shadowed by a gathering storm: specifically, the
class-conscious England of the late 1930s, with the desperation and evil of
politics paralleling the same qualities in individuals.
“The Yo-Yo” is narrated by a 73-year-old lawyer and
judge whose discovery of the title object leads him to recall a murder he
witnessed 60 years before. That crime involves, at least initially, a decidedly
unsympathetic victim: Michael Michaelmass, or “Mike the Menace,” “easily the
most unpopular master in the school, pedantic, over-strict and given to that
biting sarcasm which boys find more difficult to bear than shouted insults.”
“I began to grow up during that Christmas week. I
realized for the first time the insidious temptations of power, the
exhilaration of feeling in control of people and events, the power of patronage.
I learnt another lesson, best expressed by Henry James: ‘Never say you know the
last word about any human heart.’”
The first-person narrator of “The Murder of Santa
Claus” is even more ironic—just what one might expect from a writer of
second-tier detective fiction who does “a workmanlike job on the old
conventions.” (In an aside that must have greatly amused his creator, this
author remarks, “I’m no H.R.F. Keating, no Dick Francis, not even a P.D.
James.”)
My only complaint is that the description that follows is too deft to have
come from a hack like Charles Mickledore:
“My arrival at Marston station, the silent drive
through the darkening village, the school with the Christmas chains of coloured
paper gleaming against the windows. The first sight of my uncle’s dark
judgemental face. The carol singers creeping out under the blackout curtain.
The game of hunt the hare. The silent figure of Santa Claus at the foot of my
bed.”
Just as the elderly lawyer recounting “The Yo-Yo”
reveals how his schoolboy self displayed the ability to explain away the
unjustifiable that would inform his future profession, Charles Mickledore—described by another character as a “shy, unattractive,
secretive boy”—shows the capacity to link action and circumstance that underlay
his writing career. He figures out the culprit, then coolly deals with both the
killer and the policeman investigating the case.
James can also render an appearance concisely but
unforgettably, as in the second impression that Mickledore receives when he manages to raise his eyes from the decolletage of a
famous actress—his wealthy uncle’s mistress, Gloria Belsize—to her face:
“Now I saw what tactful touching-up had concealed:
the deepening lines under the eyes, the sagging jawline, the hectic flush under
the remarkable eyes. Then I wondered why she should be so excited by Christmas.
Now I realise that she was half-drunk for most of the day and that my uncle saw
it, was amused by it, and made no attempt to curb her.”
Above all, James depicts the devastating impact of
crime on the human personality—including an impression that can scar the young
for life.
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